Can you guess what this is? The exact answer is at the end, but in the meantime you can try to make out human rights and justice in Russia in these photos. This is how the system works when they’re not exactly allowed to beat a person outright, but the bosses have ordered that he be made to suffer. I have a spinal problem. It’s obvious what needs to be done to make it worse: keep me immobile as much as possible. You lock a person in a SHIZO punishment cell (a Russian penal isolation cell), where for 16 hours a day he can either stand or sit on an iron stool. After a month in those conditions, even a healthy person’s back would start to hurt. I’ve been sitting like this for three months already. Naturally, my back hurts badly. So I file a request: call a doctor. A month and a half later, a doctor finally comes—some woman in a mask. She examines me for five minutes and writes something in my medical file. When I ask the obvious questions—what’s the diagnosis, what has she prescribed, even what her last name is—the woman says, “Take him away.” After a while they start giving me injections. “What are you injecting me with?” I ask. “What the doctor prescribed. B vitamins, for example.” Vitamins are great, but the injections don’t help, and in general it’s a bit unsettling when they’re injecting you with some unknown drug. I ask: “Write down the doctor’s name, the diagnosis, and what you’re injecting me with.” I ask once. I ask twice. I ask twenty-two times. My lawyer files a complaint. All for nothing. I open the Internal Regulations and see that I have a fully guaranteed right to receive a copy of my medical file. I submit a request. Exactly one month later, I get a reply: here it is, attached, 26 pages. You’ve probably already guessed that the screenshots above are what my medical file looks like. Well, what can you do. We’re required to give you the file, so here’s the file—read it. And they’re so pleased with themselves, smiling, showing off. They don’t even hide the fact that this was all thought up in Moscow. The head of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), General Gostev, personally approved it, and the courts here are just like us—only instead of a uniform, they wear a robe. And you were laughing when I said I had to go to court to get winter boots. Now I’m going to court for the right to read something in my own medical file. I’m waiting for the moment when they start bringing prison gruel to the cell only after a court complaint is filed. But never mind. I’m a lawyer, and I love courts—my attorneys are just getting a little tired 😉